The Ugly Truth About Obama's "Copenhagen Accord"

Obama briefs world leaders in Copenhagen, December 18. The so-called Copenhagen Accord is a mere side deal that leaves undone the true hard work of tackling climate change. Official White House photo by Pete Souza.

Well, so much for Hopenhagen.

Organizers of the U.N. climate summit had proposed that upbeat respelling of the Danish capital when negotiations began two weeks ago, and one saw it everywhere in Copenhagen: in metro station advertisements, activist press releases and newspaper headlines. But the cheery new name did not survive the talks themselves. In the end, Hopenhagen became Nopenhagen.

Boarding the plane home on Saturday after the summit’s collapse, my eye was caught by a large wall photo of Barack Obama. Something about it wasn’t right, though. Bleary-eyed after an exceptionally late night of covering the dueling press conferences of the summit’s final hours, it took me a moment to see what was off. Only when I read the accompanying text did I notice that this Obama had a head of lightly gray hair. Barack Obama 2020, the text said, followed by a quote: “I’m Sorry. We Could Have Stopped Catastrophic Climate Change &hellip; We Didn’t.”

Sponsored by Greenpeace, the Obama ad—and similar ones featuring the faces of Chinese president Hu Jintao, German Chancellor Angela Merkel, and other leaders—had been erected prior to Copenhagen as an exhortation to reach an ambitious and binding agreement there. Now, the ads read less like an exhortation than a prophecy.

Despite what you may have heard, the Copenhagen summit did not reach an agreement to tackle climate change. What it produced instead was merely a side deal, put together on Friday evening by a handful of the world’s biggest greenhouse-gas-emitting nations, including the United States and China, the two climate superpowers. This side deal was then very grudgingly endorsed late Friday night by the European Union and other rich industrial nations, and accepted even more reluctantly on Saturday by many, but by no means all, developing nations. International opinion was so divided, and the side deal so unpopular, that the full summit explicitly declined to approve it on Saturday afternoon. Rather, it voted merely to “take note” of it.

No surprise, really: the side deal was in substance all but toothless, and the U.S. and other world powers imposed it at the last minute in a take-it-or-leave-it fashion. In a brief press conference before returning to Washington, Obama hailed the deal as an “unprecedented breakthrough,” but his own words undercut that claim. What was agreed, the president explained, was not a legally binding accord but a mere “political declaration” that he acknowledged fell well short of what climate science required. “There is much further to go,” he said.

According to many news reports, the side deal pledges to limit global temperature rise to 2 degrees Celsius over the pre-industrial level in which our civilization developed and to which the earth’s ecosystems have adapted. Would that this were true. In fact, the deal merely “recognize[s] the scientific view” that the increase should be kept to 2C.

Worse, the deal does little to bring this result about. It neither enumerates nor prescribes binding limits on the emissions that drive global warming; it merely commits both developed and developing nations to “take action” to “achiev[e] the peaking of global and national emissions as soon as possible&hellip;.” Emissions reductions will remain purely voluntary, and failing to achieve them will result in no penalties.

It “is not hard to guess” why binding targets on emissions reductions were not mandated, Brazil’s ambassador of climate change, Sergio Barbosa Serra, told reporters late Friday night. “Targets,” he explained, “are supposed to come in the second period of the Kyoto protocol”—that is, beginning in 2012—and neither the U.S. nor China are or want to be signatories to Kyoto. The original formulation of the side deal included calls for rich industrial nations to reduce their emissions by 80 percent from 1990 levels by 2050 and for global emissions—in other words, including emissions from China, India, Brazil, and other emerging economies—to fall 50 percent by 2050. But the final three-page text dropped these stipulations, said Serra.

Contrary to the White House spin, ambassador Serra did not deny that the side deal was a major disappointment. The outcome in Copenhagen, he said, was “certainly not what we expected&hellip;. But if we [the government of Brazil] had not been involved as intensively as we were, we wouldn’t even have gotten this far.”

There is plenty of blame to go around. The Obama administration’s refusal to offer more than 4 percent emissions cuts by 2020 was seen by many other countries, rich and poor alike, as evidence that the U.S. under Obama was not that different than it had been under George W. Bush. The claim that Obama’s hands are tied by Congress was likewise challenged; after all, three days before the Copenhagen summit began, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency had affirmed its authority to regulate greenhouse-gas emissions regardless of what Congress did.

The other climate superpower was no better. China dragged its feet throughout the summit, resisting calls to accept even long-term limits on its emissions and pressuring poor and vulnerable nations to toe its diplomatic line or risk the loss of development aid. It was China that vetoed the 50- and 80-percent emissions cuts, Ed Milliband, the climate secretary of Great Britain, charges today in an opinion piece in The Guardian in which he calls for the U.N. process to be reformed to prevent such blocking tactics in the future.

The one semi-bright spot in the side deal concerned finance. The treaty currently governing international climate action, the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change, obliges rich industrial nations—whose past greenhouse-gas emissions are what caused global warming in the first place—to provide aid to the poor nations that are and increasingly will be the hardest hit by sea-level rise, drought, and other effects of climate change. The side deal includes a guarantee of $30 billion over the next three years in climate aid; furthermore, it endorses a goal of mobilizing $100 billion a year by 2020. No doubt, $100 billion a year is a serious amount of money, as Secretary of State Hillary Clinton commented when first proposing this sum at the summit last Thursday. Still, it falls short of what even the World Bank, an institution dominated by rich countries, has estimated is necessary to relocate vulnerable communities, safeguard dwindling water supplies, and otherwise protect people and economies from the intensifying impacts of rising temperatures.

Nor is it clear how much of this envisioned $100 billion will actually materialize. The text of the side deal refers to both public and private funds, as well as “alternative sources of finance.” This phrasing suggests that governments hope to persuade investors to join them in assisting the poor, presumably through money raised from cap-and-trade and other forms of carbon markets. Good luck with that; the record on carbon markets so far is not terribly encouraging.

Like the White House, U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon tried to put the best face on what happened in Copenhagen, calling the side deal an “essential beginning.” The problem is, Copenhagen was supposed to be a conclusion, not a beginning. As Richard Black, the excellent environment correspondent for the BBC, has observed, the landmark U.N. climate conference in “Bali in 2007 was the ‘first step’; come to that, [the Earth Summit] Rio in 1992 was the ‘first step.”

I watched in Rio as the world’s heads of state pledged to do what was necessary “to prevent dangerous anthropogenic [i.e., man-made] climate change.” In the 17 years since, our understanding of climate change has progressed enormously. Alas, we now know that the early studies dramatically underestimated how sensitive the earth’s climate system was—how easily the increase in temperatures known as global warming could trigger the stronger and more frequent droughts, storms, and other impacts known as climate change.

In Rio, scientists warned that if global emissions were not soon cut, dangerous climate change could occur by 2100. But climate change ended up arriving 100 years sooner than projected, as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change documented in its Fourth Assessment Report, in 2007. And because of the inertia of Earth’s climate system—the physical fact that carbon dioxide remains in the atmosphere for decades and longer—our planet is now locked in to another 50 years at least of rising temperatures and the impacts they bring, no matter how quickly we might reduce our emissions.

None of this is any secret. The basic science has been explained again and again, not just by the I.P.C.C. but the National Academy of Sciences in the U.S., the Royal Society in Britain, and their counterparts throughout the world. Political leaders, in their rhetoric, have claimed to grasp the gravity of the situation and the need for bold reforms. But actions speak louder than words, and Copenhagen was a travesty of slight actions and broken promises. And though the survival of our children compels us to find one, the road ahead is, for now, difficult to discern.